Tolstoy started Anna Karenina with the sentence: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We tend to believe that the same applies to countries. Developed countries are all alike. All of them are under the rule of rights. They do not depend on the arbitrary wishes of tyrants but on the steady control of democratic institutions. Tyrannies, however, seem to differ from each other because each depends on the arbitrary wishes of a different tyrant. Since Hitler seemed to be different from Lenin, each tyranny appeared unhappy in its own way. Yet, thinking a little more on the subject, we can find a certain perspective under which all tyrannies are alike. They all need one idea that gives them legitimacy in front of the people, one idea that overrules any argument that could be raised against the tyrant. It must be an idea people consider worthy of sacrificing their freedom and rights. This is what is fundamental to the tyrannies. Before the Industrial Revolution, their legitimacy was based on the divine right of the kings. One of the most terrifying traits of our times is that today, the basis of their legitimacy is becoming hatred. This was the basis of the legitimacy of both Hitler and Lenin and of Putin and the tyrants now emerging worldwide, from the Middle East to the United States, from Latin America to India. Yesterday, the pretext for total power was unifying and aimed at having a peaceful environment inside each kingdom; now, it is divisive, making people hate each other inside their territory and those outside it.
All of them follow Hitler’s advice.
The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention into sections. The more the militant energies of the people are directed towards one objective the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified action, and thus the striking power will be all the more enhanced. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader’s following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own cause if they have to face different enemies…Such uniformity intensifies their belief in the justice of their own cause and strengthens their feeling of hostility towards the opponent.[1]
They all follow this advice. Today´s tyrannies are all alike. Not just in the sense that they use an overriding idea to entice people to surrender their rights but also in the sense that such ideas are based on hatred. They are dividing rather than uniting. This produces an ominous foreboding of what is in store if we do not act appropriately to stop this trend.
Pride in Doing Horrible Things
Addressing the Kremlin in his annual state of the nation speech on February 29, 2024, Vladimir Putin issued a threat to NATO countries stating that if they send troops to Ukraine, he will strike them with nuclear weapons. He then warned that such an action would lead to the destruction of civilization.[2] The second part was not needed to add clarity to the threat. It was a message about his character to make the threat credible. He would do it even if it would lead to the destruction of civilization.
What kind of person could say such things? What was he revealing about his character in these words? Putin not only made a terrible threat, but he made it clear that he would do it in full consciousness that it would be the end of everything, including Russia itself, for no gain in a thoroughly destructive gesture. These words can only be based on hatred. No desire for the progress of Russia or love for the Russian children who would be killed in a nuclear conflagration may motivate such destructiveness.
Some would say that he was bluffing and just wanted to inflict the fear of God on his enemies to gain tactically in his war. Still, even if this were true, who would like to associate his image with the destruction of everything? Who would think that this is a good thing to say?
Putin is not the only leader behaving in this way. He is the archetype of authoritarian characters leading fundamentalist movements, political parties, and even countries, who take pride in announcing revenge against people who disagree with them and in violating human rights and destroying democratic institutions in their pursuit of total power, using diverse pretexts to justify their unfettered will to power. You don’t have to think much to find several examples of these leaders in the United States and Latin America.
What kind of people would do this? What kind of people would support them?
Hubris and Nemesis
The Ancient Greeks were sharp judges of character. They summarized the complex traits defining a type of human being in one word, which they then bequeathed for posterity. They had two words to describe Putin: hubris and nemesis.
Hubris is an attitude towards life that preys on people in positions of power when they believe they are God and use their power to trample on others. Other definitions include the following:[3]
· It is the pretension to be godlike, and thereby fail to observe the divine equilibrium among god, man, and nature (David Ronfeldt).
· It is “a state of mind in which man thinks more than human thoughts and later translates them into act. It is an offense against the order of the world” (David Grene, 1961).
· It is “the arrogant violation of limits set by the gods or by human society” (Helen North, 1966).
· It is “having energy or power and misusing it self-indulgently” (Douglas MacDowell, 1976).
· It is “behavior that was intended gratuitously to inflict dishonour and shame upon others” or “to the values that hold a society together” (N. R. E. Fisher, 1979).
Thus, hubris combines a belief (being God) with being in a position of power and using this to excess in ways damaging to humankind, a group, or one person. Achilles, for example, showed hubris when, after killing Hector (which was legitimate because they were enemies), he tied his corpse to his carriage and dragged it around Troy (an act of excess which illegitimately inflicted dishonor on Hector’s human remains).
Hubris attracts punishment from the gods because the hubristic person both impersonates the gods and commits excesses unworthy of them. In many cases, the gods inflicted the punishment directly. Later, they created a goddess of revenge called Nemesis, specifically dedicated to giving retribution for hubris. She was the embodiment of jealousy, envy, and anger of the gods against those impersonating them. In that role, she maintained the order of the universe. The Nemesis was in charge of weighing good and evil in the record of humans and the administrator of punishment when the balance was negative. People who committed the sin of hubris disturbed equilibrium, and the Nemesis persecuted them to the world's end.
The Greek’s wisdom went beyond this portrayal of the relationship between hubris and Nemesis. Their mythology made it clear that Nemesis was not free from hubris. Like her enemies, she was prone to getting out of control and abusing her power. Hubris and Nemesis did not exist in isolation from each other.
The Hubristic Tyrant
Commonly, the combination of hubris and Nemesis has been taken as sin and retribution, as action and reaction. Hubris has been taken as the sin of tyrants, visible in their abuses of power and the conceit of their speaking, and Nemesis as the revenge of the people they have denigrated—that is, as actions taken by different individuals. Yet, the two may be associated differently: through a single person—one who justifies his hubristic actions as those of the Nemesis of his enemies.
Otto Kernberg, considered the foremost theorist of malignant narcissism, came very close to defining it as hubris in the Greek tradition by connecting it with hateful aggression.
In contrast to the ordinary type of narcissistic personality, these patients experience increased self-esteem and confirmation of their grandiosity when they can express aggression toward themselves or others.[4]
That is, the malignant narcissists feel godlike not when constructing something but when they express aggression toward themselves or others—exactly what Putin did when threatening the world with the destruction of civilization, which included not only his enemies but also Russia itself. The wave of authoritarians that is invading the world shares this trait. These people see themselves as Gods of Destruction.
Why do they identify God with destruction?
Because they are taking revenge for a deep, secret wound.
The Narcissistic Injury
As explained by David Rosenfeldt,
Pathological narcissism is also about how injuries or wounds to the grandiose self or to “idealized self-objects” may lead to “narcissistic rage.” Feelings of insult, injury, wrong, rejection, shame, envy, and vulnerability turn into expressions of anger, insolence, hate, contempt, revenge, and even dehumanization. Such rage is different from healthy, justifiable forms of anger.
[As expressed by Heinz Kohut], “The need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and a deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of all these aims, which gives no rest to those who have suffered a narcissistic injury—these are the characteristic features of narcissistic rage in all its forms and which set it apart from other kinds of aggression.
…At the end of all this is the combination of the narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders.” [5]
Who has not perceived this deep resentment in unguarded moments in the new wave of tyrants inundating the modern world? Who has not suspected acts of revenge surfacing to punish the world for humiliations hidden for a long time?
According to René Girard, the late Stanford professor who was called the philosopher of envy and resentment, these hidden humiliations are zealously kept as the most secret of the secrets. Yet, in most cases, most people can observe them plainly in the behavior and the personal history of the narcissist. Since the injured narcissists cannot hide their hatred, and revealing its cause would be humiliating for them because it would show their weakness, they look for a pretext for it and find it in invented or real injuries inflicted not on them but on the citizenry. They need pretexts for their threats of civilization destruction, bloodbaths, eternal imprisonments, and so on. As Hitler advised, they identify certain groups as the culprits of all the problems of humankind and express their hatred against them, even if they hate them for very personal reasons, like their failure to recognize God in them. Thus, they are full of hubris but think they are the Nemesis taking revenge for crimes committed by other people. They tend to blame these other people for every crime ever committed. Lenin vented his hatred of the rich, Hitler of the Jews, Putin of the West, and many others they thought had looked down on them.
By studying these characters, psychologists and political scientists have defined another personality type, the Hubris-Nemesis personality: the malignant narcissists with a pretext for their hatred. This new type combines their hubris with the Nemesis, punishing the real or imagined hubris of others.
The Hubris-Nemesis Personality
Many psychologists interpret hubris as arrogance, such as that found in vain managers or mildly authoritarian democratic politicians.[6] While this interpretation is common, it is inconsistent with the Ancient Greeks’ original conception, exemplified by Achilles dragging Hector’s corpse around Troy. In political science, the words hubris and Nemesis are reserved for people like Putin and similar tyrants who not only commit serious crimes but enjoy publishing them.
According to David Rosenfeldt, the author of a RAND Corporation study on the subject,
The hubris-nemesis complex is action-oriented; it engages a powerful need to take measures to dominate and change things, and not just talk about them…They have an inflated will to power, a sense of omnipotence and invulnerability, that encourages risk-taking. They see themselves as embodying the standards of archetypal, action-oriented heroes who can change destiny.[7]
Moreover, their actions are alarming.
This is reflected in an enormous, relentless appetite for personal power, and in an exalted sense of man’s (especially his own) ability to master fate. A hubris- nemesis leader would rather rewrite the rules of the game than follow existing rules that are not to his advantage. He must lead in order to prevail; he cannot follow or take other people’s decisions for granted. He thrives on the politics of personal deeds that, in his view, set examples for others. He may want to strengthen the institutions around him, but at the same time he may act as though institutions per se are unsuited to leading the way he wants to go. He may regard institutions as being more constraint- than opportunity-oriented, and therefore as inherently lacking the energy and vision he embodies and can impart.
In actions toward the chosen enemy, he thrives on defiance and confrontation— but he is strategic and not suicidal about this. And he regards compromise and accommodation as signs of weakness—though he is not above tactical retreats and concessions.[8]
Writing in 1994, Rosenfeldt warned about Hubris-Nemesis characters with an apocalyptic frame of mind, which he called millennialists.
Hubris-nemesis leaders with a strongly millenialist frame of mind may be particularly dangerous. The possession and potential use of weapons of “holy terror” may be attractive to a millenialist, since having and considering using such weapons may enable him to believe he can magnifiy his power and presence on the world stage and break through to a new time. Millenarian myths may give him and his followers a sense of invulnerability, which may encourage dangerous, risky behavior. [9]
These are the kind of Hubris-Nemesis characters we see in the early twenty-first century, the likes of Putin, other fundamentalist leaders, and angry populists now becoming increasingly popular in Latin America.
Declining Democracy
The indices of democracy have shown drastic falls in the last several years. The recently released Bertelsmann Transformation Index confirms this trend. According to this new release, the index has classified four more countries (Benin, El Salvador, Kyrgyzstan, and Tunisia) as autocracies. As a result, autocracies outnumber democracies by a more significant margin than before. Moreover, the remnants of democracy in the countries classified as autocracies have fallen substantially. Two-thirds of the 120 countries assessed in the index are considered defective or highly defective regarding democracy.[10]
In each case, this decline is associated with the emergence of autocrats in Putin's style.
Why are they popular?
There have always been people with backgrounds leading to the formation of Hubris-Nemesis tyrants. Yet, they can escalate power only, or primarily, in certain epochs, such as the first few decades of the twentieth century and our times. These are epochs of extreme technological transformations, which change all societal relationships and the institutional setting that framed them. Initially, the drastic changes created a minority of winners and a majority of losers, as is evident in the birth of enormous fortunes based on the current new technologies and the stagnation of old industrial workers who are now unemployed because of globalization, one of the consequences of the latest technologies. The losers tend to think that their losses come from a conspiracy, which the Hubris-Nemesis leaders promise to avenge. This explains Trump's popularity, for example. [11]
There are other pretexts for Nemesis. In Latin America, crime has increased in the last few decades, and the Hubris-Nemesis leaders promise to eliminate it if they are given total power. The turbulent waters of a state where individual rights are eliminated provide the ideal for eliminating checks and balances. The active force moving this is the hatred against the criminals and the people who defend the individual rights of the population, which identifies them as defenders of the criminals. They do not understand that in the future, their lack of rights will put them under the sway of a new set of criminals.
Hubris and Nemesis are devastating the Middle East. In the case of Russia, Putin is using two arguments to develop his Hubris by posing as the Nemesis of the West. First, he portrays himself as the defender of morality against the sexually degenerate West. He portrays himself as the God of Sodom and Gomorra. Second, he also portrays himself as avenging the attacks of the Nazis during World War II, creating a fake world in which the Ukraine war is just its continuation—a war in which, of course, he is the invader. Xi Jinping in China poses as the avenger of Western colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century and what he portrays as the stealing of Taiwan in the twentieth century.
The Greeks used to say that character is destiny. Hubristic personalities who believe they are the avengers of terrible crimes are emerging worldwide. Trump was not a tyrant when he was president, yet he presents all the psychological traits of one. He promises that if he wins a second period, he will become the Nemesis of those who did not support him on his false claims that the 2020 elections were stolen from him. In Argentina, Javier Milei shares these personality traits. He portrays himself as the avenger for the policies of all his predecessors, “the caste,” even if he applies the same inflationary policies inherited from them. He already attempted to govern by decree, the most common path to eliminate checks and balances and obtain total power. A federal court stopped him. This, however, was only a first round in a long-term game.
The Hubris-Nemesis Society
Thus, even if each of the growing numbers of autocrats thinks he is unique, he forms part of a herd of politicians seeking to vent their acts of revenge by taking advantage of a trend that is taking over the world—a deep resentment caused by a disintegration of the global order. This, in turn, leads to drastic economic changes and higher crime rates. As the order collapses, more disturbing events occur, and more people feel betrayed.
Tyrants are responding to a demand for leaders from a global society that wants revenge for real or imagined injustices. The problem is that societies are becoming Hubristic Nemesis—they want hubristic avenging leaders.
The combination of Hubris-Nemesis causes chaos. Autocrats are symptoms of the growing chaos, not their causes.
The Vicious Circle
In all cases, an erosion of the social order has preceded the ascension of the autocrats. They get their power because they promise revenge and the reintroduction of order. Yet, they reintroduce a personal, non-institutionalized order, which naturally becomes arbitrary. Arbitrariness, in turn, erodes the social order at a deeper level and leads to the collapse of the rule of individual rights. The autocrats become tyrants, and society enters a vicious circle of revenge and hubris, which leads to more revenge. The autocrats find even more demand for them because societies become prisoners to the Hubris-Nemesis cycle. They won’t stop until they lead their countries to total disaster. In the case of Putin, he won’t stop until he leads the world to destruction or is stopped in his way of doing it.
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Manuel Hinds is a Fellow at The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize. He is the author of four books, the last being In Defense of Liberal Democracy: What We Need to Do to Heal a Divided America. His website
[1] Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, Hurst and Blackett, Ltd, London, 1939, pp. 102.
[2] David Zimmermann, Putin Threatens West with Nuclear War: ‘Destruction of Civilization’, National Review, February 29, 2024, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/putin-threatens-west-with-nuclear-war-destruction-of-civilization/#:~:text=“(Western%20nations)%20must%20realize,and%20the%20destruction%20of%20civilization.
[3] The following list of definitions was taken from David Rosenfeldt, Beware the Hubris-Nemesis Complex: A Concept for Leadership Analysis, Santa Monica, National Security Research Division, RAND, 1994. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/MR461.pdf
[4] Otto Kernberg, quoted by David Rosenfeldt, Beware the Hubris-Nemesis Complex: A Concept for Leadership Analysis, Santa Monica, National Security Research Division, RAND, 1994, pp. 22, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/MR461.pdf
[5] David Rosenfeldt, Ibid, pp. 22.
[6] See David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, Hubris syndrome: An acquired personality disorder? A study of US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the last 100 years, Brain, Volume 132, pages 1396-1406, https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/132/5/1396/354862
[7] David Rosenfeldt, Ibid, pp. 35.
[8] David Rosenfeldt, Ibid, pp. 35.
[9] David Rosenfeldt, Ibid, pp. 36.
[10] David Crossland and Lottie Hayton, The new autocrats driving global democracy to a 20-year low, The Times, London, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/world-democracy-index-2024-two-decade-low-vc6zt7fq9
[11] Diana C. Mutz, Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, April 23, 2018. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1718155115